craigrow : Other stuff

WHQL Log Viewer available

craigrow — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:45:00 GMT

The first DTM Power Toy is available for download. This tool opens the packages you create to submit your drivers to WHQL letting you browse through the results and logs. Send feedback on the tool to whqldt@microsoft.com. If things go the way I hope this will be only the first of many DTM Power Toys.

It's official, WinHEC 2007 in the Big Easy

craigrow — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:27:00 GMT

This announcement has been made quietly. I guess my Campaign for anything bug Seattle can be retired now.

The Art of Project Management

craigrow — Mon, 08 May 2006 02:09:00 GMT

One of the things I had hoped could happen on this blog is a lively discussion of things I’ve read lately that others may also have read. My first attempt was some reviews of chapters in Naked Conversations. It didn’t seem to resonate with anyone, but I’m going to try again anyway.

The book I recently finished reading is Steve Berkun’s “The Art of Project Management.”

First, the title…I like to define “project management” much more narrowly than Steve. His definition seems to include vision development, business analysis, requirements gathering, product design, planning and executing a project, and much more. I prefer to define “project management” as the planning and execution part. Steve’s definition, however, is much more in keeping with the generally accepted Microsoft definition for “program manager” which could be defined as “everything not done by dev or test.” In that way, it’s a very strange title for the book. I don’t know anyone at Microsoft with the title “project manager.” Yet, the biggest strength of the book is that it does a great job of telling you the basics of what is required to be a “program manager” at Microsoft.

In fact, some material seems to be very Microsoft specific. Does anybody outside of Microsoft use the term “war team?” Steve talks about it like it is a standard industry practice. It would have been great, however, if eight years ago someone had given me this book and said, read chapter 15 so you know how the end-game is going to work and how war room functions. In fact, the whole book would be a great manual for a new PM.

By far the best chapter is 13, How to make things happen. A lot of the problems I’ve seen on projects can be traced back to the fact that people have lists of work items without any higher level lists of goals and features. The result is they’re working on the wrong stuff, working very hard and not reaching the goals of the project because it’s not clear what those goals are.

I also like his comment near the end of the chapter, “Uninterrupted time can be hard for PMs to find, so if you can’t find it, you have to make it.” That is a practice I learned when I was a stock broker. It was actually taught and institutionalized throughout the firm. Brokers went into their offices at 8am leaving instructions not to disturb them unless an order needed to be placed and closed the door until noon. This is when we did all our high priority work. After it was done we would allow ourselves to be interrupted. It’s hard to work that way within Microsoft, but I attempt to get a couple hours each day where I can focus on a critical task intently.

Other gems…

“Leaders are hired to amplify the value of everyone around them.” If only more managers understood this.
“If you can’t find any visual representation of the impact of the project on the universe, be afraid that it’s directed toward something the world doesn’t need, or that it isn’t well defined enough” You should have a visual for your vision, brilliant.
“More often complexity is a cop-out that hides poor writing or mediocre thinking.” Demand that writing be clear, concise and simple.
“Reflection is highly underrated as a decision-making tool.” We have a predilection towards action. Sitting and thinking never gets the credit or time it deserves.
Chapter 10 has excellent suggestions for email and meetings. He hit on most of things that make me tune out.
“Never walk into an important meeting without knowing the opinions of the important people in the room.” Does it ever seem like someone was totally in control of a situation you weren’t? Maybe they just did their homework.
On office politics…”If the (decision making) process is overly complex, or lacks visible owners for decisions, anyone who cares about the outcome will be motivated to be more political.” I would add to that, if the process and criteria are not made clear people are motivated to be political.

If I had a criticism it would be that the book puts heavy emphasis on process and leadership but gives short shift to collaboration. In the end it is how well you work together with your devs and testers and everyone else on your team that will determine your success. Stellar visions, great requirements, perfectly ordered feature lists and flawless designs are nothing if your team can’t produce a product in a reasonable amount of time using a reasonable amount of resources and that requires collaboration from everyone on the team. That can’t happen if the PM is sitting in his office writing spec all by himself.

New Wikipedia entry

craigrow — Tue, 02 May 2006 19:06:00 GMT

I've been impressed with the value of Wikipedia lately. In the past using the Internet to search for information on an reasonably common topics often led to many useless links. Today I know I can go to Wikipedia and likely get good, topical information and links to the best resources on the web to learn more. To that end I have made an entry for the Driver Test Manager.

Windows Live Expo

craigrow — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 01:54:00 GMT

I've used the Windows Live Expo beta to get rid of some left over construction materials I had as well as to sell the Mariner's tickets I can't use, I have season ticket in the Terrace Club. It is excellent and the new features outlined in this post should really take off. The integration with Spaces offers great value to both products. We should start seeing more stories like this one.

My hope is the Spaces people learn from this and start offering some of the same access control features that Expo has.

Puzzle time: think outside the box

craigrow — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 02:18:00 GMT

I'm not a big puzzle person but I ran across this puzzle twice in less than a week. Once in a project management book and once in an architecture book. I'm sure many of you have seen it before. If not, have fun.

More driver blogs

craigrow — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:37:00 GMT

Here is another new blog driver developers and testers will want to keep their eyes on.

Customizing Vista Setup

craigrow — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:10:00 GMT

This capability of Vista Setup came up in a number of conversations during the recent WHQL event on campus. I don't think it has much application in the driver development and testing space but apparently it is an interesting capability so I'll share it with the rest of the world here.

As you know from reading this blog, Vista is built using the same imaging technology we make available to you, Imagex (a.k.a. Ximage). You can get the Imagex executable and supporting files from the OEM Preinstall Kit, Windows Automated Install Kit or the Windows Driver Kit. Because you have the same tools, you can create an image and replace the image on the Vista DVD with your own.

The process would look something like this...

Install Vista on a reference system.
Install all of your apps, drivers, etc.
Make your configuration changes.
Run Sysprep on the system to remove all the system specific information.
Image the system using Imagex; name your WIM file install.wim
Copy the contents of the Vista DVD to a share.
On the share, replace the install.wim file from the DVD with the custom WIM you just created.

Users can now browse to your share, run Vista's setup.exe and they'll get your custom image.

Again, I don't see much application for driver development and testing but I can see why corporate IT people would get excited about this option.

Peter Wieland has started a blog

craigrow — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 04:19:00 GMT

If you're at all involved with Windows driver development I expect you'll want to subscribe to this blog. I did.

Driver Dev Con and WinHEC

craigrow — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 22:16:00 GMT

Steve asks a good question...

"Any word on DevCon yet? "

There is no Driver Dev Con planned for this year. That's pretty disappointing to everyone on the WDK team. If this is disappointing to you also, I recommend you let the WinHEC organizers know.

WinHEC registration is open

craigrow — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:52:00 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/

I'm told registrations are significantly ahead of 2005's pace.

Windows Deployment Services

craigrow — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:52:00 GMT

Most of you are aware that we aren't going to be able to ship the ASI client setup CD with the WDK as we had hoped. This leaves you on your own when doing the initial install of the client's safe OS. Some of our partners have been successful in using RIS for this initial setup. Well, RIS is being replaced in Vista with Windows Deployment Services.

Some recent blog posts on this topic…

· The Industry Insiders

· Michael Kleef

· Mark Wilson

The best comment on the whole driver signing discussion

craigrow — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 20:38:00 GMT

From Will Dean:

"The real tragedy of driver-related BSODs is that in many applications people should never have needed to write KM code at all, let alone the ghastly 50 lines of application code surrounded by 5000 lines of impossible PnP/Power boilerplate.

Hopefully WDF is going someway towards fixing this..."

I see a lot of poor opinions of Microsoft and a lot of anger in the discussion around driver signing. I see a lot of accusations that Microsoft doesn't care or understand the issues for 3rd party vendors. I wish you could be a fly on the wall in building 40. I am part of regular discussions around how to make driver signing easier, how to make WHQL less onerous, how to make working with driver signing easier when developing drivers and how to provide good options for customers who need to use unsigned drivers. I don't hear anyone who doesn't "get" the issues faced by 3rd parties or want to imporve the situation. The work currently being done to move drivers out of kernel mode is the best hope for a huge improvement in this area.

I guess I touched a nerve...Vista driver signing requirements

craigrow — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 20:32:00 GMT

This post seems to have touched some raw nerves. I wasn't expecting that but I'm not surprised either given all the feedback I've heard re: driver signing since the first beta of XP. I understand the frustrations, I also know that when Windows crashes it is usually because of a 3rd part kernel mode driver. Who gets the blame from the user though? Microsoft. Who takes the support call? Microsoft. Microsoft has a vested interest in ensuring that 3rd part kernel mode code is not going to crash systems and that when it does we can track down the 3rd party and resolve the problem.

From reading the comments it appears a couple of things are not getting communicated clearly enough.

Will Dean: "*Requiring* WHQL signing would be one of the worst decisions MS ever made. Nobody who has EVER worked *outside* MS developing peripherals or drivers would support this. Acheiving WHQL signing is difficult, slow, expensive, and backed by an extremely poorly documented test suite which rarely does the same thing twice, and rarely fails because of the thing you're testing."

Actually, WHQL signing is not required, nor is using the test suite. The requirement is that all x64 kernel mode drivers be signed with a PIC. The PIC is issued by Microsoft but has nothing to do with WHQL. From the whitepaper....

"A signed driver package must have a signed Microsoft Authenticode® catalog (.cat) file. This file contains a digital certificate that identifies the origin of the package plus hashes of the contents of the package that allow the system to verify that it has not been altered. A signed .cat file can be obtained in one of two ways:

· Obtain a Windows logo. Drivers that pass WHQL testing for the Windows Logo Program receive a .cat file that is signed during the WHQL submission process.

For information about the Windows Logo Program, see “Resources” at the end of this paper.

· Obtain a PIC and use it to create a signed .cat file. PICs are issued by Microsoft and can be used to sign kernel-mode modules that are intended for Windows Vista. The PIC verifies the integrity and origin of a driver. To be signed with a PIC, drivers are not required to pass WHQL testing."

Norman: "I would rather manipulate the registry or whatever, using known programmatic techniques, instead of pushing buttons on a dialog that was designed to be seen. I've been shafted twice by automatic button pushers."

The unsigned driver dialog is really not relevent to this discussion. The important change is that it will be impossible to load unsigned kernel mode drivers in Vista x64 systems. From the whitepaper..."Even users with administrator privileges cannot load unsigned kernel-mode code on x64-based systems. This applies for any software module that loads in kernel mode, including device drivers, filter drivers, and kernel services."

SiM: "Drivers DigSig is generally good move with one exception: currently it _requires_ Verisign certificate and so establishes Verisign monopoly."

Good point. This part is really just policy however. I could see it changing, especially if you give feedback to the right people.

Another Delicious Monster article

craigrow — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 22:37:00 GMT

Now they're getting national attention. See this article in Wired.